Sound culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sound culture is an interdisciplinary field of studies which considers the "the material production and consumption of music, sound, noise and silence, and how these have changed throughout history and within different societies, but does this from a much broader perspective then standard disciplines" (Pinch and Bijsterveld, 2004).
Sound Culture differs from traditional academic fields such as sociology of music, ethnomusicology and history of music because it adopts a much broader perspective on music and sounds in the social world. Especially Sound studies are interested in the connection between the development of the highly complex contemporary society and the ways people developed in order to manage and rearrange objects, discourses and practices involved in the listening acts.
A strong role in developing the sound studies is played by the field of Science and Technology Studies, (cfr. Social construction of technology) inside which a clear definition of the field has been presented in the special issue of the academic journal "Social Studies of Science", nr. 34\5 (october 2004).
The first seminal contributions in sound studies could be considered the books of R. Murray Schafer The Tuning of the World (1977) and of Jacques Attali Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985).
Current important contributions also are Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's Analog Days (2002); Jonathan Sterne's Audible Past (2003) and Emily Thompson's The Soundscape of Modernity (2002).
Bibliography
Pinch, T. and Bijsterveld, K, 2004, Sound Studies: new Technologies and Music, in "Social Studies of Science", 34\5, pp. 635-648
